HackCouture in Vegas!

This past weekend, four members of Team HackCouture, Erin Weathers, Daniel Herrera, Adam Smith-Kipnis and Vaibhav Vaidya, flew to Las Vegas to compete against 800 other hackers in the AT&T Developers Summit Hackathon. When we arrived, we joined forces with Bharat Chatla, an Engineer at Zappo’s and Sankalp Shere, an Engineer with Bing who had competed, and took third place against HackCouture, at the Seattle Interactive Conference Hackathon.

During the Vegas Hackathon, we created Cloud Hoodie. Cloud Hoodie is our prototype of an OnStar system for the clothes you wear. Built from scratch in under 24 hours, we’ve turned the fabric of the hoodie, into a biometric sensor array, and linked it to AT&T’s M2X Cloud services. We modified and miniaturized several other sensors and microprocessors to seamlessly pair functionality with style. While the sensor data gives the customer information about progress in active lifestyles, the hoodie can also detect a fall, high velocity impact, or heart rate anomaly. That information can be used to alert a rescue network, and with the Plantronics communication system under the hood, a first responder could initiate communication with the user.

Our iPhone app also monitors proximity in real time, by way of Qualcomm’s Gimbal system, This enables responders to quickly locate those in distress, while monitoring vital signs in real time. In addition to giving the user both statistics and a safety net for their active lifestyle, we’ve also built in gesture detection with flex sensors in the arms for increased human-computer interaction.

It was amazing to see the level of support from the sponsors. We were showered with all sorts of components and high end tech products from the sponsors. We felt great support from companies including Pebble, Plantronics, Qualcomm, Intel, SparkFun, Samsung, WahooFitness and AT&T’s M2X team. Although we didn’t place as finalists, it was understandable that the judges had a difficult job ahead of them. They were tasked with reviewing 113 hackathon projects in only 4 hours! That being said, we had a great time as a team and are looking forward to refining the ideas in this jacket as well as the glove we built in October, and bringing them to market so that other hackers like ourselves can built on these as a platform.